Limits of discrete distributions and Gibbs measures on random graphs

Building upon the theory of graph limits and the Aldous-Hoover representation and inspired by Panchenko's work on asymptotic Gibbs measures [Annals of Probability 2013], we construct continuous embeddings of discrete probability distributions. We show that the theory of graph limits induces a meaningful notion of convergence and derive a corresponding version of the Szemerédi regularity lemma. Moreover, complementing recent work Bapst et al. (2015), we apply these results to Gibbs measures induced by sparse random factor graphs and verify the “replica symmetric solution” predicted in the physics literature under the assumption of non-reconstruction.